


Lady Lark

by cleoselene



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 12:44:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16681855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleoselene/pseuds/cleoselene
Summary: His world was the cause; your world was him.  Second person unnamed character ruminates on life with August Walker.





	Lady Lark

**Author's Note:**

> Just an imagining of the kind of woman who would love August Walker. Hope you enjoy!

You used to wonder if you were just cursed to love a certain kind of man. A man who was all the things you imagined a father would be, for better or for worse, when you were young and all you had was your mom’s asshole boyfriend instead of a Dad. So you went for guys who were strong and powerful and beautiful, all things that flaccid creep who fucked your mom was not. 

Life wasn’t a fairy tale, though, and soon enough you needed to be out of that godforsaken house. So you did what you had to do, got involved with all kinds of fucked up people. Drug dealers, first, though you didn’t get high too often yourself. You never liked to lose control that way. Working with drug dealers led to working with arms dealers led to John Lark, or August Walker, or whatever the fuck his real name was. He was going by Raymond when you first met, and he was 23 and you were 21 and he was fresh out of college, doing some work he could never talk about, work he told you not to concern yourself with. You were impressed enough by the college degree; you never finished high school yourself. Your skills were practical, learned on-the-job.

He was just another fuck at first, but a one night stand turned into two, and on the third night, you were wrapped up in his warm embrace when the bullets swished through the air right over your sleeping bodies in the hotel bed. You acted on instinct, having been in enough shitty situations to know what was happening. You’d been dealing with all kinds of sleazebags since you were 15 and you left home to avoid Mom’s old man; you could handle yourself in a shootout. The way you pushed him to the floor and rolled off in such a fluid motion took him by surprise. You’re small and seemingly slight and no man ever expected the agility or the strength or the composure. Nor did they expect the baby glock you always hid under your mattress, placed there when you entered the hotel room. Always prepared, just like a fuckin’ girl scout.

His own piece was in the drawer next on the nightstand to you, you’d seen him put it there in your plain sight, clearly not seeing you as a threat. You slid it over to him under the bed without needing to be prompted. Two bodies shooting, two bodies surviving. A few hours later, as you watched the weighted bodies sink in the nearest lake, you looked at each other and you both knew this was something different.

You told him your real name, and he told you his. You took a shower and ate a huge breakfast at a greasy spoon diner and found another hotel to sleep the morning away, naked in each other’s arms, ‘06 Bonnie and Clyde. 

In time, he told you his passion for the world, his ideas that people were not thriving because they were too divided. That governments have gotten too corrupt, that the world had stopped working. That only a great catastrophe could bring people back together, working for better as one united human race. He had his reasons for feeling that way, and you had yours. 

You shared the pains inflicted on yourselves by the world like you’d exchanged names that night by the lake as the bodies sank. Everything before him felt sick and wrong, and everything but him continued to feel that way. But with him, you could see the flickering glimpses of what life should be and could be for everyone.

You quit your job eventually. Arms dealing was lucrative but dangerous, and he had plans. Plans he wanted you far away from. You indulged him, you’ll always regret that. He might have been stronger with you by his side. But you always indulged his whims, it was a weakness. You could never resist that furrowed brow and pleading eyes.

Together you picked out the perfect cabin in Alaska, so far away from everyone and every seedy thing either of you were ever connected to, totally off the grid. He was there whenever he could be, and he’d hunt and you’d cook and you’d both talk, always, about how to change the world, how to fix the world. It was worth fixing, you both believed it. But the structures all had to change. 

A drastic change required a drastic action.

He was willing to die for that drastic action. He called you before he left on that last ride. He told you he would do his best to come back, but that Ethan Hunt and his associates were continuing to be a thorn in his side.

You believed he would survive, though. He’d done so much, been so many people, been the CIA’s August Walker and John Lark and Drake the arms dealer from Tacoma. He was stronger than anyone you’d ever met, brilliant and fucking beautiful and too fucking good at what he did to die. 

And he’d been _yours_ , and you knew that only the people he loved knew his real name. The world had taken most of the people who knew that away from him. But you knew. You remembered his name.

You remembered the way his chest felt under your fingertips, a broad chest with strong muscles, covered in a luscious forest of chest hair. Further down your hands would move to find a happy trail with a treasure you adored at the end inside his pants. You remembered the way his arms felt around you, like iron vices that somehow held you so gently. You remembered the day he decided to trim his full beard to a mustache and how you laughed and asked if you could have a ride on that mustache. You remembered your undignified giggle when he scooped you over one shoulder and carried you to the bedroom to provide that ride.

You remembered lying next to him after, his face smelling of your own pleasure, your fingertips smoothing over the mustache. You asked him why he went for it, pointing out that mustaches were not particularly in fashion.

“I don’t give a fuck,” he said with a crooked grin. He was always so fucking cocky and that was part of why you loved him so fucking much.

And you did love him. Not for his perfectly chiseled jaw, or his blue eyes that had a small flaw in the left eye, a brown fleck, a perfect imperfection that made him more beautiful. Not for the curls in his hair, not for his god-like body and hairy chest and thick thighs and not even that mustache you enjoyed riding so much.

The man known to the world as August Walker didn’t give a fuck what people thought of him. He didn’t give a fuck about what most people thought, he’d let them go, knowing a great many people would have to die to remake the world into something less broken. He didn’t warn friends or family, what remained of those people. He didn’t give a fuck who would die when those nukes poisoned a third of the world’s water supply because it had to be done.

But he gave a fuck about you.

He made sure you were far away.

Safe.

He was supposed to come back to you.

But he didn’t. Ethan Hunt took that from you. You believed in the cause, and mourned its failure, but what burned was that Hunt took _him_ from you. If only he’d been returned to you, if he’d found a way home, you might have convinced him his life was too precious to continue risking it like this. But you never had the chance. He was gone.

You saw the pictures of his recovered body. His beautiful face, _shattered._

The cause wasn’t the reason. It was never your reason. But the Apostles were still out there, John Lark’s devotees, and you still had a copy of his manifesto. It would take time. You would have to recruit, to do things you’d sworn you’d never do again years ago, things _he_ promised you’d never have to do again.

But all you have left is your bloody vengeance, you will lay it at your beloved’s unmarked grave.

When you’ve removed Ethan Hunt’s heart from his chest and used it to mark where the only man you ever loved now rests.

You took a new name. Your old one, your real name, that was his. You didn’t even whisper it anymore, for he was the last person alive to know you by that name. You didn’t wonder what kind of man you were meant to love anymore. There was no kind of man like him. There was only him.

From then on, you were Lady Lark.

And you were ready to make certain the IMF would not be ready for you.


End file.
